WASHINGTON — House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries had warned Republicans they would come to regret the congressional redistricting fight, and when Democrats counterpunched last month with a redrawn Virginia map, he had made his point.
The net tally of seats gained and lost was essentially a wash.
“F— around and find out,” said Jeffries after the election victory.
But in a matter of days, the race for control of the House — and the speaker's gavel — was dramatically reset by back-to-back court rulings that wiped out the Democratic gains in Virginia and now threaten to erode Black representation by Democrats in the Deep South.
The shifting political prospects have been a wake-up call for Democrats, who have been favored to win back the House this November, riding the wave of President Donald Trump's dipping approval ratings, and a test for Jeffries as the party faces an enlarging map of Republican-friendly seats.
The leader's aligned outside group has spent some $60 million, much of it on Virginia alone, a hit to the Democrats' resources as they confront Trump's Republicans.
“It sort of crystallizes the election is now a contest between one side that has the money and the maps, and the other that has the voters and the candidates,” said Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic strategist and former deputy director of the House Democrats' campaign arm.
Jeffries would make history as the first Black speaker of the House
Jeffries, who is in line to make history as America's first Black speaker of the House, acknowledged the Democrats may need to flip twice as many Republican seats — a total gain of six rather than just three — to win the majority in the aftermath of the redistricting fights.
But he insisted that Democrats were on track to pick up seats, as they did in 2018 during Trump's first term, because Republicans are relying on redistricting — rather than policy solutions — to win elections.
Trump Republicans "don't give a damn" about Americans' financial struggles, Jeffries said, paraphrasing the president's own remarks.
During a closed-door meeting on Wednesday with House Democrats, Jeffries described the work ahead in almost existential terms for the country.
He said the court rulings against the Voting Rights Act and the Virginia measure were “disgusting.” And he warned his colleagues that Republicans would proceed with “diabolical intensity” in their campaigns to regain control of the House, which Democrats will not only have to match but “we have to exceed it with righteous intensity at all times.”
“Failure is not an option,” he told the Democrats, according to a person in the room granted anonymity to disclose the private remarks. “We have to win, and we are going to win.”
Path to power depends on a handful of House seats
Never easy, the race to the House majority was also not expected to be this complicated. Republicans hold a slim majority, among the most narrow in modern House history, and midterm elections tend to favor the party out of power, as a check on the White House.
But when Trump said last summer that Republicans were "entitled" to five more GOP seats from Texas, it sparked a redistricting crusade that led Jeffries to respond in kind.
Rather than take what they call the high road, Democrats said they decided to fight back, believing they could not fully count on the nation’s institutions — in this case, the courts — to provide a check on the GOP power play.
Jeffries flew to Austin to join the Texas Democrats fighting the redistricting plan in their state and stood with those same lawmakers in Chicago where they fled to deny statehouse Republicans a quorum. He joined the private meetings of California Democrats as they launched their counter attack, a voter initiative that put five more seats in the Democratic column. The Democrats picked up a seat in Utah.
And on it went.
“We had to very quickly make a decision, set a course and take a risk,” said Rep. Jared Huffman, D-Calif., recalling the closed-door talks last summer. “There was no guarantee this was going to work out.”
The Virginia measure became a turning point, Jeffries' biggest swing yet, putting Democrats essentially at parity, if not a potential upper hand in the number of seats gained, and shifting Old Dominion more securely into the party’s column.
He rallied some 1,000 churchgoers in Richmond ahead of Election Day as voters headed to the polls.
House Speaker Mike Johnson on Wednesday called the Democratic play for Virginia a "crazy overreach" that was rightly rejected by the state's high court.
“Fortunately, the plan failed spectacularly,” Johnson said.
Redistricting battles push into 2028
While Democrats said they expected the Supreme Court to gut the Voting Rights Act, the Virginia Supreme Court's decision to toss last month's election results blindsided many of them.
Jeffries joined a call with furious Virginia Democrats over the weekend who said they were more determined than ever to win the Republican seats outright, regardless of their loss over the map changes.
The overall tally after nearly a year of redistricting battles is still shifting as Republican legislatures in the South rush to redraw their maps in the aftermath of the ruling in the Voting Rights Act case, many of them preparing to eliminate districts held by some of the most senior Black lawmakers in Congress.
Rep. James Clyburn, the veteran Democratic legislator from South Carolina whose own seat is at risk, blamed the justices, not Jeffries, for the outcome in Virginia and elsewhere.
“What the hell, he can't control the courts,” Clyburn said, vowing to run for reelection regardless of where his district is drawn. “Don’t put that on Jeffries. We won the vote.”
Jeffries acknowledged that this year's maps are almost set, and pivoted to 2028 when he said Democrats will redouble their efforts to confront the GOP redistricting battle ahead of the next election.
“We know this unprecedented assault on Black political representation, the likes of which we have not seen since the Jim Crow era, the ghost of the Confederacy” will continue, he said. “The challenge that is in front of us is ensuring that there is a decisive and overwhelming response in advance of 2028.”
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